The sad truth of life is that people die. While there are a number of choices of burial, most people opt be buried under ground, and that calls for a cemetery. But with the ever increasing rate of demises, and ever decreasing land, surely cemeteries would soon fill up? Apparently, we think that they don’t and here is why.
Firstly, cemeteries do fill up. Space is finite, and ever increasing burials mean that that space is taken. The primary reason why cemeteries don’t seem to fill up is because they keep expanding at a certain rate i.e. more land is granted to them with time. Cemeteries are usually maintained by the state and their land charter is incremented as a function of time. However, there is a limit to this and soon enough extra land is unavailable.
There are techniques to ensure that cemetery space is used effectively. The concept of shared burials has been in vogue since some time. In some places, multi-storied graves have also been used! Most new cemeteries are pre-planned for small burial spaces so as to maximize the number of graves that can be housed. The problem is certainly there, and the only permanent solution seems to be a shift to other forms of burial. Cremation has been actively used as an alternate, and accounts for roughly 80% of the dead in UK. However, there are religious barriers in the adoption of such a practice.
So space for cemeteries is fast running out. While more land keeps being allotted for this purpose, cemeteries have had to adopt space effective measures to ensure survival. Most of us might feel that cemeteries don’t change over the years, but a keen eye would observe otherwise.
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